Linux

Here's my bad experience with snaps back when I ran Kubuntu. I thought I'd give it a try, maybe it'll be like systemd where lots of people loudly complain but it works and it's something slightly different to learn.

My Firefox was automatically moved to snap. First of all, I noticed that there was a slight delay whenever I clicked a link outside of Firefox that wasn't there before. I think it also switched the file picker back to gtk which I hate and it moved my config to somewhere funny. So I get a popup saying that there's an update for Firefox, and that I need to close it. Normally with apt I just do the update and then restart later. So I close Firefox and... nothing. No user feedback, I can't tell if it's doing anything. I assume it's done and I reopen it. Nope, I get the same popup later. I guess I didn't leave it closed long enough. The whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth. Canonical is pushing their homegrown software on me because they want to compete with flatpak or whatever, and they made my user experience worse as a result. I gained nothing from this except frustration and distrust that lead to me switching distros when I built a new machine. Snaps also spam your df output with all their different crap that gets mounted. I ended up removing snap and using the Mozilla PPA and was happy again.